Hopes for a peace pact

This Thursday, the Associated Press (AP) will meet with the Media Bloggers Association in hopes of creating appropriate guidelines for quoting AP stories, reports Wired (via the AP).

Prominent bloggers recently critiqued the AP for its defensive stance on blogs that quote heavily from its content. The AP argued such excerpts fall beyond the realm of "fair use."

Preliminary talks will be conducted this Thursday between Jim Kennedy, director of strategic planning at the AP; and Robert Cox, president of the Media Bloggers Association. The objective will be to find a way for bloggers to quote from AP content without devaluing licensed material.

"We need to protect our content, no matter who's using it, but we also recognize that the bloggers perform a really important function on the internet in terms of increasing the engagement of the audience online, and we want to facilitate that," said Kennedy.